The challenged identity of a field: The state of the art of eParticipation research

A growing number of research contributions deal with the issues of technologically mediated participation in public decision-making in an ever-wider number of disciplinary fields. As research on eParticipation begins to mushroom, the effort of the international research community in this area is being put in creating an identifiable common framework for eParticipation research. Among other instruments, trying to establish a solid body of literature to be referred to mainly pursues this. But how is this process actually evolving? Which are the currently available outcomes of this effort? What is the nature of the research framing process in progress so far? In this paper I analyse the features of a literature database on eParticipation developed within DEMO-net, the European Network of Excellence on eParticipation research. I conduct a quantitative analysis on the 651 items of the DEMO-net bibliographical library and a qualitative review of 73 items. Results show that the acknowledged literature on eParticipation features a surprisingly little occurrence of all the expected central key concepts and instruments of eParticipation, while the majority of the contributions are descriptive in nature and come from non-journal sources. Findings depict a research field still in search of a more coherent, stronger identity, and suggest the need for concept clarification and dissemination, more strictly connected to empirical and interpretative studies.